The Wall
by pinkolifant
Summary: A one shot where Michael survived and they meet in a Pyramus and Tisbee situation. It might evolve into a more chapter story in the distant future where this one shot would be in the middle of the story.


**The Wall**

She works in the psychiatric clinic in Montana. Not in Blackfoot, never there, but not far either. Little Mikey goes to local school. It's not a very good one, but there's no bullying and the local kids are nice. The teachers and the parents don't watch much TV so there are no too many questions asked.

It is better that way.

The clinic pays a fairly decent amount to a former inmate and a widow of one of the most famous fugitives of all times. Sara Scofield needs a job.

So she had left the rest of her family in Panama and drove to Montana, not asking too many questions herself.

The clinic has a ward where she is not supposed to go. It is walled from the rest of the precinct. The wall is about forty feet high, and it almost looks ancient, with moss growing between the stones. But it's only a ruse, a part of an intricate design invented to make the patients in the part of the clinic she works in enjoy their stay and re-convalescence after minor psychological troubles.

It is a wellness centre for the rich who suffer from heartaches and wanderings of the mind.

She finds it all well, for there is nothing much for her to do. Blood pressure is measured and sleeping pills distributed to those suffering from insomnia, and no toes are cut, and no men are burnt.

She is not supposed to go to the wall, until one night she does. Little Mikey is away for a school trip, it is the first time he sleeps away from home, so she is unable to go there and she stays in her office in the clinic well into the night.

It is June and the smell of the tree blossoms poisons the air and the mind, so she walks to the wall despite that she should not. And she goes to the edge where it touches the low fence leading to the gate of her part of the clinic.

She goes and she hears it, a subtle knocking, a fading sound.

Conveniently, almost at her height.

There is a small hole in the wall, or there isn't, it's too dark to see. But the sound is there so she presses her ear to it and she listens.

"Hello," a voice says and her heart is in her throat, because she most definitely doesn't hear his voice.

It is impossible.

It's been a long time since she stopped taking medicines to stop hearing him in her dreams and in her woken state. She is whole, grown up, steady, clean. She is alone.

"Hello," a voice repeats and she replies. "Hello there," she says. Whoever it is, it doesn't hurt to give in to imagination, just this once.

"Why didn't you come before?" the voice asks her. "I thought I was alone in my section of the garden. It's been driving me insane."

It's okay, she knows. It's not Michael. It's just a patient from the incurable ward who doesn't know her. And talking and imagining things doesn't hurt. Just this once.

"Well, actually, I'm in another part of the garden," she says and blinks away the tears.

"It's summer," the whisper comes through the hole, and she wishes to climb over the wall and see him.

That is even less possible. For the wall looks ancient but its top is secured with the state of the art wiring starting a complex alarm system and electrocuting the intruder. Not fatally, but enough to get caught. To lose a job she so badly needs.

"It is," she says.

"Tell me how it looks," he commands her.

"Well, it's green, and people stay out late, and talk, and play stupid ball games."

"It sounds as the summer should be," he gives a laugh, and her heart constricts even more.

"I guess so," she manages to stutter back.

"Hey," he says and she is unable to answer. Only to smell the blossoms and weep from the beauty of the night. Like crazy. She will take something to get better as soon as she is back home. Mikey cannot see her like that.

"Hey," he repeats, "will you come again tomorrow? We can do a picnic, through the hole."

_The hole, _ she thinks and giggles nervously, for it sounds exactly like something Michael would have done. He would have found a place to run away from any enclosure, from any prison, state of the art or not.

xxxxxxx

The next evening she asks the baby sitter to come at night, reads a bedtime story to Mikey and drives back to the clinic carrying a picnic basket. Nothing is going to cut it out for her because she is not meeting Michael.

She's meeting an illusion of him and she is so happy about it that it hurts.

She tells a lie to a night guard wondering where it came from, much more convincing than before when she had to sneak in to the places she worked to get the stuff she'd been using.

The wall is there, but there is no sound, only silence. Maybe a cheese sandwich could help her, so she sits in the freshly mowed grass and eats with an appetite of a teenager. An orange juice at midnight also tastes better than she remembers it.

There are candles, but lighting them is not a good idea. The guard could see and recommend to the administration that she belongs with the patients, rather than with the doctors of the institution.

She stands up and touches the cold wall with her fingers, but there is no hole, no sound. It must have been a summer hallucination of her mind, first time she has something like that, but then, there's mostly a first time for everything.

But the night is even more beautiful than the previous one, and she doesn't want to go home. So she eats some more and the basket is almost empty. She lays in the warm grass and looks at the stars, cruel and far away.

She falls asleep, she is not sure for how long, and when she wakes up, she is laying in dew, a fear creeping over her.

She is not alone. The ground is too soft on her left side, freshly tilled.

A voice says, on _her _side of the wall, in unfeigned amazement: "You are here. I thought that you wouldn't come. They told me no one would ever come."

She is not afraid and she looks for the candle. She doesn't care about the guard any longer.

"Who told you that?" she asks nervously, grabbing the matches.

"The doctors, the people," he comments. "So I stayed there. I had nowhere else to go. Until I heard your steps."

The small flame is alight and his face is closer than ever. Tears blur her vision and her lips tremble.

"You are beautiful!" he says as if he sees her for the first time in her life and whatever they did to him it's obvious that he has no idea who she is. Nor who he is, most probably.

"Hello," she says, shyly, "do you want to go for a ride?"

"Why not?" he smiles _that _smile of his from the Fox River and she is happier than she has ever been.

"Let's just," she says, stamping on the soft ground, "cover this up."

"Don't worry," he says, "it's all planned. The tunnel collapsed on the other side. I patched the hole. They will never figure it out."

And as she takes him to her car under the cover of darkness, she believes him.

They don't pass by the guard, they go to her office and jump out of the window from the first floor.

He kisses her on the back seat of the car as if they were both students, and she thinks where they will go and who will come after them.

It never ends.

But she would not have it any other way.


End file.
